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Ring tones are a cool way to customize your cell phone. You can make your
cell phone play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Led Zeppelin's "Whole
Lotta Love," or a tune of your own making. And you can use the cell phone
emulator that ships with the Java Mobile Toolkit to test your creations.

In this article I'll show you how to make ring tones using Ring Tones
Text Transfer Language (RTTTL). Then I'll show you how to use the emulator
in the Java Wireless Toolkit (WTK) to listen to the ring tones that I
demonstrate and those that you can make on your own. You don't need to know
programming or music theory to understand this article. Knowing a little about
musical keys and scales will make some points easier to comprehend. But for the
foundation of RTTTL, I'll teach you all that you need to know. However, in
order to operate the RTTTL Player that I made for this article, you will need to
have the Java Wireless Toolkit installed on your computer. You can download it
for free
here.

Understanding RTTTL

Ring Tones Text Transfer Language is a simple text-based format that you use
to create ring tones that can be uploaded into your cell phone via various cell
phone uploading techniques. (The mechanics of wireless uploading are beyond the
scope of this article. However, as I mentioned earlier, I will show you how to
use the cell phone emulator in the WTK to listen to your RTTTL files.)

Just about all cell phone manufacturers support RTTTL. Your cell phone has
the smarts to be able to decipher a melody written in an RTTTL text file and
play it as a ring tone.

The RTTTL format is easy to learn and easy to use. Let's take a look at
a simple well-known melody in standard musical notation: the main theme from the
first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (see Figure 1).

If none of this makes sense to you at this point, don't worry.
We're going to address the particulars in a moment. The important thing to
get from viewing the two examples above is a feel for how the same melody is
represented in two different notational formatsnotes on a traditional
music staff and in RTTTL.

The RTTTL Format

An RTTTL file is made up of a single string, divided into three sections
separated by colons (:). In the example below, I've color-coded the
Beethoven's Fifth example for demonstration purposes.

fifth:d=4,o=5,b=63:8P,8G5,8G5,8G5,2D#5

The first section (blue text) is the name of
the RTTTL melody.

The second section (aqua text) defines the
default values for the file.

The third section (green text) describes the
melody.

The structure for the first section is straightforward and obeys a single
rule: The name can have no more than 10 characters.

The second section is more complex. It describes the melody defaults. There
are three categories of default values: duration, octave, and beat. The way that
RTTTL handles these default categories is to define each category with a single
character and then assign a value to that character. The second section of the
color-coded example above shows the default values:

Duration is defined by the letter d.

Octave is defined by the letter o.

Beat is defined by the letter b.

To translate the default values above into lay terms, you might say something
like this:

The default values for this melody are as follows. Unless otherwise specified,
any note played will have a duration of quarter note, as indicated by the
notation d=4. Unless otherwise indicated, any note identified will
be played in the fifth octave, indicated by the notation o=5. The
tempo for this melody (how fast it goes) will be 63 beats per minute, as indicated
by the notation b=63.

Before we move on to the last section of the RTTTL string, the place where
the actual melody is described, let's take moment to get a fuller understanding
of the duration, octave, and beat defaults, both technologically and musically.

Duration

The length of a musical sound is what we refer to as the duration of
the note. If musicians had a more scientific heritage, duration would be
indicated as a length of timeplay this note for a second, play that note
for half a second, play another note for two seconds, for example. But exact
time notation is not in the musician's legacy. Instead, to the befuddlement
of every elementary school music student, musical duration is measured relative
to other notes using a system of whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth
notes, and so on. In most instances, the quarter note is the single unit of
measure, in which each quarter note receives one beat. Thus, if you were to
count evenly, saying "1, 2, 3, 4," you would get a musical pattern
that looks like Figure 2.

There are times when you might not want to play a note on a beatjust
have silence. In musical terms, this is called a rest. For example, count
"1, 2, 3, 4" evenly again. But this time, skip saying "2,"
and just pause when you get to that point: "1, <pause>, 3, 4."
When you do this, you'll have a musical pattern that looks like Figure 3.
Notice the symbol following the first quarter note. This is a quarter-note
rest symbol. This means not to play any note for one beat. RTTTL handles
rests as pauses and can be programmed accordingly. You'll learn how to
program pauses in a later section.

Octave

Think of an octave as the region that a scale occupies in musical
space. Figure 10 shows two scales on the musical staff. These two scales are the
C Major scale, made famous in that well-known tune "Do-Re-Mi," from
the musical The Sound of Music. Notice that the second scale repeats the
first one, but an octave higher. If you were to sing
"Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do" twice, continuing up the scale the second
time, you would be moving through two octaves of musical space.

Beat

Musically, the beat is measured on a per-minute basis. If a melody is
assigned a "60 beats per minute" value, this means that the melody
will get one beat each second. If you want the melody to go twice as fast, you
increase the beat to 120. Figure 12 shows the musical notation for setting the
quarter note to 60 beats per minute.